Mother in Law: Being a tough mum

Someone told me once that sometimes you have to be a 'tough mum'. I laughed in their face - I’m a funny mum, a kind mum, a good role model mum. Not a tough mum.

Sometimes I think about what I liked best when I was a kid and wanted more of - playdates, cake, Babysitters Club books and my mum being around after school - and try to lavish my kids with those things as much as I can.

Yesterday, Deceptively Angelic Child 1 (DALC1) came home from a sleepover, upset because the two other kids had phones and she didn’t. When I dropped her off, the other two had their hair the same way - they had text each other in advance to confirm what hairstyle to have. I’m fairly sure this was after a video call (DALC1 on her tablet) between all three of them when they had decided what to wear, so the hairstyles were arranged after the call, on phones. Which DALC1 doesn’t have. Then, during the sleepover, the other girls were actually texting each other - literally excluding DALC1 from the conversation while she was in the room with them. Is Judy Blume still writing? Because I don’t think she’s covered the phone issue in her books. Essentially, though, it is same old, same old.

DALC1 says she can’t be friends with these (clearly delightful) girls unless she has a phone. You may recall in Are You There God, Its Me Margaret (which I am over the moon to hear is being made into a film) Margaret needed to wear a bra to be part of the gang.

If it was a bra she wanted, I would buy it. To be honest, she makes good arguments for most things she wants and often convinces us to get the thing she must have - the most recent example being a guinea pig a couple of years ago. The requests are usually accompanied by Powerpoint presentations and, as I say, her persuasive writing skills are really quite something. I pray that one day she will use these skills to convince someone to give her a job, or persuade parliament to change a law or something. I pity the boss she asks for a pay rise. It is not so much charming the birds down from the trees as shaking the tree every hour on the hour until the birds just come down and tidy her bedroom for her because she’s given them 10 reasons why it would be a good idea and it is easier to go along with it.

You will have noted, of course, that she has a tablet. She can do just about everything she could do on a phone on her tablet. She has a Switch and a Chromebook. But just like supermarket trainers are not the same as Nike, this is not the same as having a phone. I’ve said to her, on occasions over the last few months, that she is starting to sound bratty. Olivia was the first girl in her class to get a phone, and it is so she can text whichever of her separated parents she is not with. Summer was the second, but at the age of eight she was walking home to an empty house every day after school. Can she not just count her blessings?

The reason we won’t let her have a phone now is - unlike a bra or a guinea pig - it is a whole world of potential friendship issues in itself. 'They will still exclude her, if they want to, even if she’s got a phone,' my husband said last night. It is just another way for Mean Girls to push and pull everyone around to their masterplan. I’ve seen it already on her tablet - sarcastic messages, messages being ignored, chats being deleted. I don’t want all this in her pocket 24/7 yet.

But I have come to realise that she can’t count her blessings. That’s what adults do, not children. 90% of DALC1’s thoughts are taken up with friendship stuff and she just wants to fit in. We’ve all been there. I had trousers with turn-ups one year at school and a boy called me Tommy Turn Up the whole year.

I wanted to mother my children like my gran grandmothered me (see above re cake). But there is a reason grans get to be like grans and mums don’t. I realised yesterday I can’t always keep my child happy, even when it is within my power to give her the thing she wants. If I feel strongly that I know what is best for her, and it makes her unhappy, then she will have to be unhappy. We could be a lot firmer - scare her into not mentioning it again, for example - but we don’t want to be those parents either. So, like lots of times ahead, no doubt, in bringing up this desperate-to-be-popular child, we will have to face it: we don’t even get to be popular in our own house.

Some facts and identities have been altered in the above article